


free is free is free (is...)

by TheTartWitch



Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: Asexual Allison, Gen, diana amasses a following, diana does not sing, diana!allison, diana's wild hunt, gee ananke kind of showing your hand there maybe, i mean it could be, isaac hurts, isaac turns into a faun, no bitten werewolves, no deep ananke plot like the original, or not really as deep, pan kind of adopts isaac, pan stands for wild things, pan!stiles, pan's wild and is hunted, smol goat!isaac, stiles is hurting, that's not his sexual orientation, the argents do not believe in the pantheon, the hales do not trust the pantheon, until he doesn't, until he isn't, world of teen wolf but the pantheon revives every ninety years in beacon hills
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2020-04-12 10:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19129771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: Every ninety years twelve gods return as young people.They are loved.They are hated.In two years, they are all dead.It’s happening now. It’s happening again.…Welcome back to Beacon Hills.





	1. stiles stilinski|pan

**Author's Note:**

> really wanted to write a tw+td fic but also wanted a crossover. wracked brain, thinking of fandoms, and voila! teen wolf!   
> this is majorly au. make sure you've read the tags!

He is the first. He sees her out the kitchen window as he does dishes, standing there in an ornate dress, lots of lace and dangling chains, peering back at him through that headdress-veil she’s got on. She doesn’t beckon or call out to him. She doesn’t need to. He’s alone and tired and he walks out to her barefoot and they stare at each other. He should be asking who she is, why she’s trespassing in his backyard, what’s up with the High Priestess garb, but he doesn’t speak. He’s so tired and alone, both in this moment and in his life. Dad’s at the station. He’s been at the station for a long time. 

She looks him up and down and smiles. 

“Hello, child,” she says softly but with steel. Her hands fist at her sides. 

He opens his mouth to speak, to finally ask questions, to call for help. Something feels off, wrong in some invisible way. She doesn’t let him.

“ _ You are of the Pantheon _ …” she whispers, and something inside him falls apart in tiny pieces and puts itself back together in fire, forged and free.

\--

He can’t stay in the house. Wild things don’t live in cages, especially not cages full of painful memories and people who can’t decide if they love you or not. He doesn’t go back through the still-ajar back door; the woman watches him climb the side of the house to his window, watches him pry it open with music and hum what he wants to his hand: the last good picture of Mom. A pair of earrings he never worked up the courage to wear, that he put on then. His phone, on a whim.

He waves a hand and the stuffed animals Mom gave, pushed gently in a box to the back of his closet, bursts open. Animals burst from within, glowing and shrieking and free, just like him. Wild. He fingers the pipes strung around his neck and grins.

Everyone’s going to be free. He’ll make sure of it.

\--

The woman watches him go, not trying to make him stay. She’d looked at him sadly, told him “I’m so glad to see you. I know you won’t come with me, but come visit if you feel like it?” He’d laughed and promised nothing. The wilderness made no promises. She’d see him if he felt like it and only then. 

“Don’t you want to play for them?” She asked, gesturing around them. Her fingers were wrinkled between her many rings. Chains looped between them, fusing to a thin plate of metal on the back of her hand. She was wild, too. She has chained herself. “They’ll be there tomorrow, stuck in their little routines. Won’t you go and play for them, sing them a song?”

He bounced on his heels, barefoot in the greenest grass. He played with the feeling of it for a while, the grass growing around his feet up to his bare ankles, the thin loose gypsy pants slung low on his hips, the winding of wood and vines on his arms, the pipes around his neck. There was something on his face; he couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there, a mask of bark and flowers. 

“Perhaps,” he finally tells her, focussing on  _ this _ moment,  _ this _ statement. “Who knows? Wild follows no schedule. Wild is free, and free is free is free. What use is planning for chaos? Chaos comes when chaos wants.” His head tilts back; he studies the constellations as though they are new, or perhaps as though he is new. She laughs at him. 

“Very well,” she concedes. “It’s been a long time.”

He looks at the woods and doesn’t say,  _ I remember the last time you killed us. _ The wilderness can wait for her this time, and swallow her when it’s good and ready.

“Welcome back among us, Pan.”

\--

He sits on the stump playing idle tunes on the pipes,  _ his  _ pipes. He likes the stump. It reminds him of something, something wild and powerful and vicious. When he’s not playing he pets the side of it and thinks of how long it lasted before something cut it up.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out to see it, curious; he’s received several texts over the last few days, generally from Dad, at first inquiring what he wanted for dinner and then, when he didn’t respond, busy playing, questions on what he was doing, where he was, was he okay. Scott texted a few times asking the same things, then Lydia (how did she get his number? Scott probably) telling him to come home because Scott was freaking out and it was rude of him to leave them all in the lurch like that. He sent her a picture of his middle finger first, then, deciding that was fun, sent one to everyone else too: Dad, Scott, Jackson (two middle fingers for Jackson, a bird was happy to hold the phone and let a squirrel hit the button), a few teachers, Mrs McCall, and the rest of his contacts. He sent a video by accident to Greenberg, one where he couldn’t remember for a second how the camera worked and his mask popped into view. He watched the video just to see his face for a while. 

He was tanned; that was new. His eyes were his usual deep wooden brown, interspersed with thin flashes of gold as though something in his eyes was reflecting light. Curling strands of neon green framed his face, his hair was still that burnt amber, his nose and mouth were in the right places still. He had sharper canines. His ears had a slight elfin point and thin green-gold chains ran up the sides of them, originating at his earlobes. His face was mostly covered by a mask made of bark and flowers blooming right out of it. It was like a masquerade mask, covering everything above the bridge of his nose and framing the vague shape of his eyes.

He squeaked in the video, turning the phone this way and that in his hands. He could hear himself muttering “don’t I just click a button? I’m old enough to know how to work a smartphone” among other, funnier things.

Dad was trying to call him. He threw the phone against a tree so hard they both shattered. Wild things don’t need Dads, just like they don’t need Moms. 

\--

He and Scott used to be friends. They spent years being closer than anyone else, practically in each other’s pockets, until Allison Argent transferred to Beacon Hills High School and Scott left Stiles in the dust without a second glance. They went from ‘together all the time’ to ‘rarely meeting each other’s eyes across the hallway.’ Scott spent all his time hanging out with Lydia and Jackson, Allison’s friends, and Stiles went home early and did the dishes and the laundry and pretended he had a social life when his dad bothered to ask. He’s grown used to being ignored.

Which is why it’s so surprising that the four of them come stumbling into the clearing with the rest of his guests the day after he sends out the invites. They stand separate from the others; Lydia is wearing surprisingly sensible tennis shoes for her hike through the woods, Jackson’s peering around them with a tense but vaguely expectant expression, Scott’s clinging to Allison and glancing into the trees uneasily, and Allison looks very determined. She’s new to town, so maybe she doesn’t believe in the gods yet. That’s okay. He knows Ananke is out spreading the word, waking the others, and that she doesn’t often come to performances so he’s not surprised she’s not here. If Allison’s not satisfied with this one she’ll have countless chances to go to a performance in the future.

He skips out of the trees to settle on the lovely stump, pipes jangling around his neck. All heads immediately turn his way, especially the four he’d been watching. 

“Hello, everyone,” he whispers, settling onto the stump cross-legged, and the sound carries throughout the clearing. “I’m Pan. It’s nice to meet you all properly _. _ ”

Scott’s attempting to push his way through the crowd with Jackson following behind and not only is that not a conversation he wants to have, he’s ready to play some music.

He’s ready for some chaos. 

He lifts his pipes to his lips and starts to play, enjoying the way the world goes fuzzy around him and the people’s eyes gloss over. 

\--

By the end everyone is sleeping. He escapes while Scott, Lydia, Jackson, and Allison snore away in a corner. He may not be Dionysus, but there’s a reason the English language derives the word “pandemonium” from his name.

\--

The boy calls out to him with his name and a sacrifice. Pan answers as eyes in the dark of the boy’s graveyard, whispering in the boy’s ear, “Why do you call Pan, Isaac Lahey?” The boy’s brought potted plants to give to the forest, brought a hand-carved set of pipes, brought himself.

“I looked you up,” Isaac says, hushed for fear of someone coming, but desperate. “It said you’re the god of the wild mostly, but also a god of protection. It said you’re more inclined to help people than not, most of the time.”

Pan slips out of the trees. His hooves make no sound against the soft dirt. Standing before Isaac now, he can see they’re almost the same height. Pan’s hooves add a few inches, giving him the advantage. He peers down at Isaac and laughs. “You come to beg a boon of Pan? A protection?” He sobers suddenly. “What is this evil, Isaac Lahey, from which you desire protection?”

Isaac stares into his eyes; if Pan concentrated, he could make them goat’s eyes, stretch the pupils like taffy, unnerve the boy even more than he already is. He doesn’t. It seems...cruel, almost, to scare the boy in the middle of this conversation. 

Whatever Isaac’s looking for, he seems to find.

“My dad,” he says quietly, staring at the ground. Pan’s fists clench; in this lifetime, at least, he knows about parents that aren’t exactly good for you. The part of him that’s still Stiles remembers shouting, dishes and vases thrown at his head and narrowly missing, being unable to sleep at night, worrying that she’ll forget him again and try to get rid of him like she kept promising when Dad wasn’t around, which was more and more often. “I can’t...keep doing this anymore. And somebody at school said you kind of had something similar, and I thought maybe you’d...help. Me.” He seems in a rush to get the words out, like they’ve been caged inside him the way Pan was caged in that house.

Pan approves.

“Very well,” he says, accepting the gifts from Isaac’s arms. “You’re certain you pledge yourself to Pan? It will come with changes.”

Isaac nods.

“I do,” he says, and the toll of a bell rings out around them, throughout the graveyard, throughout the whole town. A light flicks on in the window of the house behind them. Pan grins.

“I take you, Isaac Lahey, as a wild thing under my dominion. I bless you with freedom, with grace, with the image of Pan. I grant you leave of your father, as undeserving of you as he is, and I release you into the forests of my realm.” He pokes Isaac’s forehead, vanishing the gifts to his stump. Isaac shudders. His eyes close and then open again, greenish-gold and a little foggy with power. Fur sprouts in rushing tufts on his legs, and his feet shift and swirl into hooves. Bells dangle around his ankles, jingling softly in the faint night breeze. 

“So mote it be,” they finish together, and they’re gone by the time the eldest Lahey opens his front door.


	2. allison argent|diana

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is seven hounds with silent, loping runs and swift feet. She is the Huntress.   
> She is Diana.   
> She does not go home.

She’s walking home after school when she sees her. The woman. She’s on the other side of the road staring at her, dripping with black silk, glittering silver chains, a veil of storm-grey lace covering her face.

“Allison Argent,” says the old woman. Her mouth twists. “The silver unbeliever.”

Allison is only a block from her house. She could scream; surely her neighbors would come. She could run; surely the old woman is too frail to follow her for long. She could fight; surely the rumors of ‘miracles’ going around the school aren’t true. Monsters are for fairy tales and gods don’t exist.

She doesn’t move. Doesn’t say a word. The old woman smirks behind her veil. She leans forward, putting weight on a black gilt cane Allison hadn’t noticed before. Her mouth opens in parts and pieces like a faulty machine, and all Allison can hear is

_ “You are of the Pantheon…” _

\--

She is falling apart, coiling back together. She is silver leggings, a dark grey sports bra, dark eyes, bull’s-eye tattoos and sharp canines. She is a long bow and gleaming arrows. She is seven hounds with silent, loping runs and swift feet. She is the Huntress. 

She is Diana. 

She does not go home.

\--

The woods belong to Pan already, but he is a friend of hers in past lifetimes if not this one. She meets him at the edge, dogs baying. 

“Pan,” she greets, and he laughs. The boy beside him looks nervous but centered, less terrified of anything and everything. A deer sidles up beside him and he pets it gently, distracted from the sight of her.

“Diana,” says Pan cheerfully. The bells around his ankle chime merrily up in his tree. He peers down at her, goat’s-pupils and ear-chains all, and laughs at what he sees. “The Silver Lady, hmm? Pan thinks perhaps you chose well this time.”

“Allison?” The boy asks quietly. She nods to him, memories warring. She remembers him now. Allison remembers him, despite only going to school with him for a few days. 

“Hello, Isaac. Your father’s looking for you, you know.” He shrinks away from her, looking at Pan and being waved off. He lopes off into the trees, more graceful on hooves than she’d have thought. When she looks back at Pan, she almost feels the urge to tell him of Scott’s regrets. She almost opens her mouth, almost shapes her lips to push the sound out, but Pan is laughing. 

“Ananke _would_ do this to us,” he snorts gleefully, stomping one hoof into the grass like a dog scratched in just the place. “The hunted first, soon to be chased by the Hunter.” He grins at her, his mouth like a slash across his face in the dark, and she realizes he does not like Ananke, the grandmotherly, divine alarm clock that she is. She considers this as his eyes focus on the hounds at her feet. “And you already have followers! Pan knew you could do it, Argent.”

His lips curl in a different sort of way, but it’s humorous. “The Silver Lady of the Night,” he whispers, eyes peering at them deeper than they should. They glint in the fading light, a reflection of brilliance off broken glass.

“They came to me,” she tells him, “Strays, I think.” Pan shrugs.

“There will be more to come,” he replies, voice as distant as it was before Ananke found him. “There always are.”

\--

She does not sing when they find her. Diana does not  _ perform _ , does not  _ display _ herself. Pan can keep his pipes and crooning madnesses; Diana does not sing. 

That is for the hounds.

\--

The girls come to her first, unhappy and ashamed and begging for an answer, an escape. Diana does not sing for them.

That is not to say she is above giving them freedom from the things they fear. 

“No one will touch you in my cohort,” she whispers to them in dark forest groves, and they cry tears of joy and relief and exhilaration, and when they stand they are different, necklaces of teeth and bone, hair wild from running and fighting and dragging their hands through it at the end of a hunt, silvery dresses and no shoes because their soles (and souls) are harder now than they ever were before. 

\--

They meet Pan and his lamb in the woods and throughout the night they dance to Pan’s piping, twirling Isaac into laughing with his heart instead of his mouth, shrieking to the sky, trampling grass that will grow back greener in the morning. Pan does not thank her, but she does not need him to. Wild things must dance, sometimes, to remember they’re free. Chaos thrives here, in throats and eyes and hearts and minds, and she knows he feels how right this is just as she does.

She does not need his thanks for that.

\--

Ananke finds her again, sighs at the state of her girls (mud-splattered and filthy, grinning at each other, eating meat over a fire and flicking sparks in retaliation for joking insults) and asks once more if she’ll sing. If she’ll perform for the masses, give them what they want instead of using the gifts she’s been given for herself for once. 

Diana does not sing. Diana does not display herself for anyone’s viewing pleasure, does not reveal the intimate parts of herself because others demand or plead for it. 

Diana says no. With force.

Pan’s weapon may be his pipes, but Diana awakens with a bow for a reason, and she is never alone for long. There are too many children left to unforgiving situations for Diana to ever stay alone for long. Ananke finds herself threatened by many suddenly-angry girls and a bow-wielding goddess, and she attempts to make her exit graceful.

Given the way Diana’s girls laugh once she’s gone, she’s failed. Diana can’t say she’s upset about it, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i realize they're both greek/roman but guys this was where allison just was meant to be yanno?? and she came the easiest after writing stiles when i began and when i came back to this after so long i didn't want to just leave it, and i already had allison mostly written out.   
> can't say i'm fully pleased with how it ended, but i'm also pretty okay and just wanted to give anyone reading this a small reward, so enjoy and let me know what you thought!!

**Author's Note:**

> let me know if i should add any tags. 
> 
> this is not where i was intending isaac to end up. isaac! you were supposed to be one of the pantheon, not a faun! darn it!


End file.
